DEVELOPMENT OF A MIXED-FLOW OPTIMIZATION SYSTEM FOR EMERGENCY EVACUATION IN URBAN NETWORKS

In most metropolitan areas, an emergency evacuation may demand a potentially large number of evacuees to use transit systems or to walk over some distance to access their passenger cars. In the process of approaching designated pick-up points for evacuation, the massive number of pedestrians often incurs tremendous burden to vehicles in the roadway network. Hence, one critical issue in a multi-modal evacuation planning is the effective coordination of the vehicle and pedestrian flows by considering their complex interactions. The purpose of this research is to develop an integrated system that is capable of generating the optimal evacuation plan and reflecting the real-world network traffic conditions caused by the conflicts of these two types of flows. The first part of this research is an integer programming model designed to optimize the control plans for massive mixed pedestrian-vehicle flows within the evacuation zone. The proposed model, integrating the pedestrian and vehicle networks, can effectively account for their potential conflicts during the evacuation. The model can generate the optimal routing strategies to guide evacuees moving toward either their pick-up locations or parking areas and can also produce a responsive plan to accommodate the massive pedestrian movements. The second part of this research is a mixed-flow simulation tool that can capture the conflicts between pedestrians, between vehicles, and between pedestrians and vehicles in an evacuation network. The core logic of this simulation model is the Mixed-Cellular Automata (MCA) concept, which, with some embedded components, offers a realistic mechanism to reflect the competing and conflicting interactions between vehicle and pedestrian flows. This study is expected to yield the following contributions * Design of an effective framework for planning a multi-modal evacuation within metropolitan areas; * Development of an integrated mixed-flow optimization model that can overcome various modeling and computing difficulties in capturing the mixed-flow dynamics in urban network evacuation; * Construction and calibration of a new mixed-flow simulation model, based on the Cellular Automaton concept, to reflect various conflicting patterns between vehicle and pedestrian flows in an evacuation network

Fire Immediate Response System Workshop Report

California's recent wildfires, exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, have focused the nation's attention on the problem of managing fire at the wildland urban interface. With the goal of understanding how new or re-imagined technologies could improve early fire detection and response, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation hosted a "Fire Immediate Response System" workshop (April 24 -26, 2019). The workshop identified the following priorities and recommendations, which are described in detail in the report.* Develop a shared, integrated platform for diverse sources of data, intelligence and information* Conduct new wildfire risk assessments with high-resolution mapping technologies* Improve scientific understanding of "megafires" through retrospective analysis* Enhance fire behavior models and associated inputs for real-time prediction* Perform a cost-benefit analysis of investment in solutions vs. reactive management* Target investments in the development and adoption of new technologies* Expand multi-stakeholder dialogue, collaboration and actio

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 172

This bibliography lists 132 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in September 1977

Development of a holistic approach to integrate fire safety performance with building design

Building fire safety is significantly influenced by building and fire safety regulations (often codes and standards). These regulations specify what fire safety measures should be included in a given building as a minimum requirement. Since fire engineers develop fire safety designs based on the regulations, they are often viewed as the primary agents in ensuring the fire safety of buildings. However, their mission often starts with given building design features, such as interior spatial layout, exterior shape, site plan, and so forth, which are mostly determined by architects (or architects). Although architects design buildings within the boundaries of the regulatory requirements, their focus is not generally on fire safety, but more on visual and spatial aesthetics of buildings. These objectives are linked to building form and functionality, which are not subject to the building and fire safety regulations. These objectives can sometimes compete with fire safety objectives in such a way that buildings can be unsafe in certain situations due to unintended effects of building design features on actual fire safety performance. To determine whether a building has design features which work against fire safety performance, evaluation of building fire safety performance must take into account the effects of building design features. If fire safety performance is significantly decreased by building design attributes, additional fire safety measures or modifications of the building design should be incorporated to provide an appropriate level of fire safety performance. While there have been various building fire safety evaluation tools developed over the last forty or so years, none of them comprehensively considers building design features and their associated effects as key performance parameters. In this context, the current study develops conceptual models for fire safety performance assessment in both qualitative and quantitative manners. After scrutinizing previous fire incidents and the building features which contributed to their outcomes, various fire safety performance attributes, including building design features, are identified and cause-effect relationships among the attributes are established. Then, the attributes are organized hierarchically like a tree diagram such that the performance of one upper level attribute is determined by the combined performance of multiple lower level attributes. In this way, the performance of bottom level attributes propagates upward to the upper level attributes. Two tree diagrams are established for the most common fire safety objectives, life safety and property protection. Each attribute in the tree diagrams has two quantified values: performance value and weighting factor. The current study uses three different performance values (0.01, 0.5, and 1) for bottom level attributes representing poor, average and good performance, respectively. In addition, as each attribute can have different contribution to upper level attributes, a weighting factor between 0 and 1 is assigned to each attribute which represent the relative importance. With these two values, the performance value of an upper level attribute is calculated using the weighted sum method (summation of multiplied values of performance value and weighting factor) which is commonly used in the Analytical Hierarchy Process. As the performance of an attributes is a function of specific designs, building uses, occupants, and site conditions, in the first instance, judgments of the fire engineers can be used to assign weights and performance values, but they can also be determined jointly among stakeholders. Generally speaking, the details of attributes for fire safety performance are not determined at once. Rather they are gradually determined as the building design progresses. This means that in early design building design phase, many of the attributes are unknown as well as fire safety performance. Once appropriate information can be provided to architects by fire engineers at each building design phase, it is likely to avoid possible conflicts between design details and fire safety performance. Using the fire safety evaluation model, weak attributes for fire safety performance can be identified and possible make-up strategy and building design approach can be developed in advance. This provides the potential for the collaboration between fire engineers and architects and at the end for increasing building fire safety performance of buildings

The Development of a Health, Safety and Environment Management System for an Integrated Gender Separated Campus in the Middle East Region – A Case Study

In recent years, concerns regarding health, safety, and environmental issues increased. This led to the development of integrated Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) Management Systems in many organizations, including universities. The study of the current HSE management system of the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) has been conducted as a typical National university in the Middle East Region with the added unique feature of a large integrated campus with gender separation. Emphasis has been given to the E-shared laboratories of the UAEU as the interface between the two sides (male/female) of the campus. The E-shared laboratories incorporate most of the teaching laboratories of the Colleges Food and Agriculture, Engineering and Science, and it is here that most of the chemicals and biological samples of the university can be found. At the same time, the E-shared laboratories present a physical bottleneck in the movement between campuses, also in emergency situations. Spatial Analysis has been conducted to model crowd behavior in the E4-shared laboratories building in emergency situations. In addition, about environmental concerns within the health and safety infrastructure, the waste treatment with silica gel and recycling of silica gel in educational and small research laboratories has been studied

e-Sanctuary: open multi-physics framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuation

The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit

Seismic risk of Open Spaces in Historic Built Environments: A matrix-based approach for emergency management and disaster response

Abstract Earthquakes affect the safety of the users hosted in both indoor and outdoor urban built environments, especially in Historic Built Environments (HBEs). Many full HBE-scale risk-assessment methods are defined, while methodologies oriented to local analysis of meso-scale elements, such as Open Spaces (OSs), are still limited. Nevertheless, OSs play a crucial role in the first emergency phases, like in the evacuation process, since they host emergency paths and gathering areas. The seismic risk of an OS mainly depends on the combination of the damage suffered from facing buildings and the exposure, which mainly refers to the quantification of human lives. Damage levels result from the combination of vulnerability and hazard-related issues, while exposure is essentially affected by the number of OS users, whose spatial distribution is strongly time-dependent. Methods to quickly combine these issues are needed, especially in view of the deeper insights for the implementation of risk-reduction strategies (i.e. according to simulation-based approaches). This work offers a novel methodology to quickly perform Seismic Risk Assessment and Management of an OS by correlating damage levels to exposure-related issues. The method is composed of two specific matrices, which are developed according to quick literature-based approaches prone to rapid meso-scale applications in HBEs, also by non-expert technicians. The "damage matrix" links the site hazard to the building vulnerability. The assessed damage levels are combined with the users' exposure into the "consequences matrix", to estimate the risk in emergency conditions for the OS users, thus supporting decision-makers in promoting robustness/preparedness strategies